


Comfort in the Sound

by Ganymeme



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Blind!Roy Mustang, Canon Disabled Character, M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Pre-Relationship, Promised Day, hohenheim lives au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-10
Updated: 2019-07-10
Packaged: 2020-06-26 01:34:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19757887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ganymeme/pseuds/Ganymeme
Summary: After everything, after the battle with Father, after Edward retrieves Alphonse and the clean up begins, Roy is left on the sidelines of the clean up to nurse his wounds. A man approaches him to offer aid.(Birthday ficlet for a friend! Originally posted to Tumblr.)





	Comfort in the Sound

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Artdirector123](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Artdirector123/gifts).



> I waffled on how to tag for the fact that there's no actual violence in the fic, but there is moderately graphic description of Roy's wounds _from_ canon violence. Went with no warnings, but here's that heads up.

He hasn’t been abandoned, exactly, just set down out of the way, on a miraculously whole bench, as Hawkeye is roped into the immediate aftermath of helping. But it’s hard not to feel abandoned, even if he knows he’d be worse than useless, even if the dull, hot ache in his hands reminds him that he is one of the wounded who needs help. Mostly, Roy is exhausted. Exhausted and overwhelmed and bizarrely grateful in some ways that he can’t see anything, because the noise is bad enough and his head is throbbing and—

— _crumbling, shattering, black ash and stones for bones, bodies burn and buildings burn and the world is spinningspinningspinning_ —

He shakes his head and the pain behind his eyes flares. He hisses, agonized, and shuts his eyes tight, as if that will help. Everything feels ever so slightly unreal, off-kilter and dream-like, and he’s not sure it’s because of the blindness or if it’s that part of him still feels caught, pinned like a bug spread-eagle on his back—

Roy inhales sharply and sits up, shoulders back, parade-ground stiff. Shoves those newest shadows down with all the rest and—

—shudders, fighting the urge to jump when a voice speaks up nearby.

“Ah, it was… Mustang, was it?”

The voice is low, oddly accented, and soft. Unfamiliar. Roy can’t help but stare in the direction it has come from, because he’s really not at all used to not being recognized. Which means this must be…

“Yes,” he says, cautiously. “Van Hohenheim?”

The man hums his assent. Though Roy tries, he can’t make out the sound of feet on cobblestones, but he does hear it when Hohenheim grunts as he sits down beside Roy. When he speaks again his voice is still slow and sad, twice as tired as Roy feels.

“Van will do,” Hohenheim says, “Just Van.”

He sounds like he might be smiling, and Roy swallows back the anger that surges up, that he can’t see and pastes what he hopes is an appropriately genial smile on his face (it feels more like a skull’s rictus grin).

“Van, then. What can I do for you?”

There is a pause, long enough for Roy to panic but short enough that he doesn’t quite get around to plotting escape routes.

“It is more what I can do for you, I think. Are you in pain?”

“What?”

Roy blinks, stupidly, in Van’s direction. He’s bruised and battered and had two swords shoved through his hands barely even an hour ago so yes, he is very much _in pain_.

“Your eyes,” Van says, and he sounds so very… calm and patient, that Roy can’t even bring himself to be embarrassed.

“My…” The pain that has been burning behind his eyes spikes, then, and Roy tries once more to fight it back, but the adrenaline is wearing off and he winces instead. He doesn’t know why this man, this stranger, is asking, but at this point there doesn’t seem much use in lying.

“Yes,” Roy says, voice as cold as he can make it, though that doesn’t quite hide the pain.

“Hmm,” Van hums, and then fingertips brush the side of Roy’s face. He startles, jerking backwards, and hisses out a string of curse words when he throws out a hand to catch himself.

“What the hell?” He snaps. His hand is burning and his face is burning and his heart is thundering in his ears, fear coursing through him.

“Oh! Oh, ah, my apologies.”

Roy wants to be angry. He wants to be spitting mad at Van for putting hands on him, but he sounds so startled and so genuinely apologetic that the anger fizzles away. (Which makes something relax, a bit, in Roy. He’s been angry enough today.)

Before he can rally to demand an answer, Van speaks again.

“I may be able to do something about that.”

The sudden flash-freeze of hope stills Roy. He looks to where he thinks Van’s face might be and fights with his suddenly leaden tongue to find words.

“You— about—?” His voice cracks.

Van sighs. “About the pain. The toll itself cannot be fixed, I’m afraid, not even with alkahestry, but if Truth took what I think it did… May I?”

The feeling of tears pricking at the corners of his eyes is probably a good sign, Roy thinks. Means that part of his eyes is still working, anyway. It was stupid to hope. Stupid, stupid—what have the Elrics been searching for all this time, after all?

His throat works, and it takes much longer than Roy would like for him to be able to speak without simply crumbling.

(— _buildings bodies bones, burning falling shattering, a thousand thousand lives, shards of glass on the wind_ —)

“Alright,” he croaks, dredging the words up past the memory of a horrible yawning void behind his ribs.

Fingertips brush Roy’s face again, and this time he’s prepared. Blunt, square fingertips trace along his temples and then circle his eyes, as carefully and delicately as if Roy were made of glass, of fine porcelain, of something precious and fragile. Warm, sturdy fingers against his cheeks and oh, it has been so very, very long since anyone’s touched Roy in any gentle way. His hands flex, trying to tighten into fists, but pain flares, shooting up his fingers and wrists, and his next breath escapes in a hiss.

The fingers, slowly mapping out symmetrical points around his eyes, still.

“Am I hurting you?” Van asks. Roy stiffens. He hadn’t realized Van was so close, but now that he’s spoken he can feel it, sort of. The warmth and weight of another body near his own, close enough that Van’s voice had been pitched intimately low and was still clear as day.

“No,” Roy says, hastily, because he doesn’t want those fingers going away. “My hands just…”

There’s a pause, and Roy shifts his hands on his thighs, hyperaware of their crippled, awkward weight, of the tacky dampness of drying blood.

“Ah,” Van says, “I see.”

Then those fingertips settle in, arranged in a delicate pattern around his face, and broad, soft palms cup Roy’s cheeks. He isn’t sure, exactly, what Van is doing that is supposed to help with this mother of all headaches, this bastard child of a broken bone and a migraine. But if this gentle touching, this cradling of Roy’s face in his hands, is all Van plans to do, well, Roy is more than happy to drink it all in. (He is so very, very tired. And scared, and lonely, if he’s honest. Which he isn’t, usually, with himself, but it has been a very long day and he’s been turned inside out twice over.)

Then Roy hears the familiar crackle of alchemy, feels an answering hum in his own bones, smells the snapping ozone and—

Afterwards, he will never quite be able to explain what it felt like, when Van’s fingers sank into his skull like it was syrup. Maybe if he hadn’t still been reeling from the aftermath of the Gate he would have found it more unsettling, and it was undeniably weird but somehow not… unnatural.

The tingling buzz of alchemy dances over his skin and behind his eyes, diffuses down his nerves and his spine, and when the transmutation stops and Van’s fingers are once more resting firm and flesh on Roy’s skin, he gasps and shudders, the aftershocks shaking through him like an orgasm.

“What the _fuck_ ,” he croaks.

Van chuckles. “Feel better?” he asks, and for the first time there is something in his voice besides a quiet, tired sadness, something warm and alive.

Roy pauses, blinks, leans as subtly as he can into one of Van’s palms (he is a weak and greedy man, he’ll take advantage where he can). Evaluates. His head still aches, but no worse than one of his tension headaches after a long day in the office.

“Yes,” he says, and then because the Madame didn’t raise a complete asshole, “Thank you.”

He manages to keep himself from following the warmth of Van’s hands, as they draw away, but only just. He expects the man to leave, now that his task is done. There is, surely, much more to be done by an alchemist as powerful and unique as Hohenheim. But Van just settles back onto the bench and, after a moment, begins narrating quietly just what is going on all across the battle-torn parade grounds. For the second time in as many minutes, and surely just because of how tired he is and for no other reason, Roy finds himself fighting back the urge to cry.

Afterwards—after Marcoh, and the Stone, and a second trip to the Gate that leaves him retching into the dust but able to _see_ , one eye forever blind but one eye just as good as before—Roy doesn’t get a chance to see Van Hohenheim. He doesn’t even manage to hear any rumours of him, and when he dares ask the Elrics they shrug and Alphonse speculates that he may have headed back to Risembool.

Despite his townhouse being in an entirely undamaged part of Central it is four days after the eclipse before Roy finally staggers back up the weed-riddled cobblestone path. He makes it halfway up before realizing there is someone sitting on his front step. A man, broad-shouldered and blond, with a beard a few days past needing a trim and a face regal enough to be carved in marble. He’s dressed like a librarian who got lost on a hiking trip but is sat there, peacefully unassuming. Roy hasn’t kept himself alive this long without at least a handful of (entirely justified) paranoia, though. His still healing, but thankfully gloved, hands protest as he curls his fingers in his pockets.

“Might I ask—” he begins, as cold and commanding as he can manage, but he never finishes.

Because the man says, “Oh,” and lifts his chin from his hands to blink up at Roy.

“There you are,” he says, and it’s the same voice that’s been haunting the better of Roy’s dreams these past nights.

“I was wondering if I’d gotten the right house.”

Roy stares, partly in confusion, partly because Van looks so remarkably like the Elrics its astounding. He rubs at his good eye with a knuckle, blinks it clear, and stares again.

“Van?” He says and oh, damn. A small smile softens Van’s face and draws out the crow’s feet at the edges of his eyes and it is entirely, wholly, unfair that the man with the nice voice and warm hands is also remarkably attractive.

“Hello,” Van says pleasantly, as if there is absolutely nothing out of the ordinary about their meeting. “I thought I might help you with rebuilding, if you’ll have me.”

And that, after everything, was how it began.

**Author's Note:**

> If you're wondering about Roy getting healed so soon, that's because this follows the manga (at least, as far as it follows canon at all. :P), there. With a bonus 03 reference, of course.


End file.
